Review of The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America.

Abstract

Says he’s going to look at “social perceptions about the uses of space, time, and words.” “The middle class in America appeared as a new class with an unprecedented enthusiasm for its own forms of self-expression, peculiar ideas, and devices for self-discipline.” (ix) culture=“a set of learned values and habitual responses” (x) 1840 to the present “the idea of the middle class . . . central to American social attitudes” note: Andrew Jackson (elected 1828) impt. seems to have brough middle-class rhetoric into political discourse in a new way “The middle-class person in America owns a critical skill or cultivated talent by means of which to provide a service. And he does not view his ability as a commodity or external resource like the means of production of manual labor. His ‘ability’ is a human capacity—an internal resource—as unlimited in its potential expansion and its powers to enrich him financially and spiritually as the enlarging volume of his own intelligence, imagination, aspiration, and acquisitiveness.” (4) undertakers become “funeral directors” and then in the 1890s (?) morticians nineteenth-century America has more college educated bussinessmen than does England (6) the middle-class=a state of mind 32 Oliver Wendell Holms Sr. on stats “averages” 35-6 Fertility rates; middle-class controls its reproduction 47 Telephone 1876 (3,000) becomes 1900 (1.3 mil) 1840-1915 the decive period according to him [BUT clearly a break before the Civil War vs. after 1870] 56 dictionary entries Webster’s 1829 public/private a mid-Victorial thing 73 David Levinsky 86 Associations 1870s 1880s polemic against the administrator v. professor arg.: they are all PMC In new U all subjects “raised to the status of theoretical studies” (291) because that’s what makes the specialized, expert, professional. -- This is also a description of America vs. Europe career v. calling in ministry 173-76